For the Bees

Further to inventions that imitate nature, here is one of a series of bumblebee-themed images I was asked to design some years ago. A "friendly bee" was asked for, one that was busy about a garden. It was a fun assignment and I eventually came up with several versions of BumbleBee, a family of them and their garden, including hollyhocks. I have been reviewing the images recently, going through the files, and this morning as I walked by the lake I came upon this:

an end-of-summer drowsy bee nestled in the hollyhocks that have naturalized along the unfinished harbour wall, among the small convolvulus and michaelmas daisies.

"And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease.. "
"To Autumn", John Keats

Monarch Butterflies

To quote Avril on the subject of Fairy, "It is difficult to invent anything for Fairy that does not already occur in nature". The description of Dr. Flora Fauna's bubblemobile travels (with fairy dog) alongside the famous migrating butterflies appears in the Winter edition of The Illustrated Fairy Gazette. This morning I stepped out into a flurry of Monarch butterflies on the move.

They dallied with my Morning Glories before disappearing over the fence.

In twos and threes, one cluster after another, they hovered over green lawns and wayside flowers

pausing for only brief refreshmentbefore moving on, along the lakefront and across the creek

east to west, on their long migratory path. They will soon reach Point Pelee where they gather in hundreds and thousands to feed on the milkweed plants before their astonishing long flight to the mountains of central Mexico, where they overwinter.
It is the first time I have seen them in such numbers locally and it was a fitting end to a beautiful, if all too short, summer.